A BIG GUN
Ruth did not answer for several seconds. She seemed to be thinking deeply, and Alice, who was fairly bursting with numberless questions she wanted to ask, respected her sister's efforts to bring some logical queries to the fore.
"Then your hopes that Boston would prove to be your home were not borne out?" asked Ruth, after a bit.
"No, but even yet I feel sure that I have lived at least part of my life in Boston, or near there. One doesn't have even shadowy memories of big monuments and historic places without some basis; and it was not the memory of having seen pictures of them. It was a real vision."
"And the name Estelle Brown?"
"Oh, I'm sure that belongs to me. It seems a very part of myself."
"Did you tell any of this to Mr. Pertell or to the other moving picture managers?" asked Alice.
"No. You are the first persons to whom I have told my secret," Estelle said. "I was afraid if I mentioned it they might make it public for advertising purposes, you know. They might make public the fact that a young actress was looking for herself and her parents. I never could bear that!"
"But you want to find your folks, don't you?" asked Alice.
"That's the queer part of it," Estelle replied. "I seem never to have had any relatives. The way I feel about it now, I would never know that I had had a father or a mother. I seem to have just 'growed,' the way poor Topsy did in Uncle Tom's Cabin. That is another strange part of my present existence. I seem to be in a world by myself, and, as far as I can tell, I have always been there."